Overcrowding leads to violence, so violence worsens a staffing crisis. A staffing crisis impedes rehabilitation.
The latest report interviewed Mr Laidlaw who worked in prison.When Andy Laidlaw began working as a prison officer in 1998 it was “an enjoyable job”. There were “low lows” as well as “high highs”, but it was mostly safe and you “could feel like you were making a difference”. Mr Laidlaw, a straight-talking Scouser, climbed the ranks, eventually becoming a deputy governor. He describes the work—which demanded the skills to handle the most troubled people and the dexterity to “get assaulted safely”—with pride. The best officers were a “mixture of Kofi Annan and an MMA champion”.
Mr Laidlaw reckons the rot set in about a decade ago. A cost-cutting drive meant that thousands of experienced officers were paid to leave.Overcrowding started to become less manageable, violence more routine. Rather than run towards a problem, fearful officers would retreat behind locked doors. In March Mr Laidlaw left the service, aged 57, stripped of hope.
The roots of the mess in Britain’s prisons lie even further back, in a set of punitive policies adopted over several decades. The Labour government seems to recognise there is a problem. On October 22nd it announced a sentencing review; promisingly, it will be chaired by David Gauke, a former Tory justice secretary with a reformist bent. But to grasp how entrenched the problems are, they must be seen as a cycle that affects both inmates and officers, which leds to some social problems. Call it the prison doom loop.
Stage one is obvious: a relentless rise in the prison population. Britain incarcerates far more people than the rest of western Europe (see chart one). In England and Wales the number of inmates has doubled in the past three decades, to 87,500, driven by a shift to much longer sentences. As courts work through a backlog of cases, the population is set to reach 100,000 next year, and to keep rising. New prisons are expensive: spending on buildings and staff has lagged behind demand.
Inside prison walls, the effect has been like gradually turning a vice. Cells designed for one are shared between two or three. Officers struggle to let a whole wing, often comprising several hundred inmates, out for work, education or “association time”. Emergency-release programmes have become an unavoidable pressure valve: the latest batch of releases took place this week. But there are still thousands more prisoners in England and Wales than can be held in “safety and decency”, according to official data.
Crowding squeezes a prison’s ability to maintain control. That leads to the second stage of the cycle: a surge in violence. Brutality has always lurked within British prisons. Read a prison memoir from the 1970s or 1980s and you will find stories of inmates being “turned over” by the “screws”. That became much rarer when the prison service modernised in the 1990s, including by recruiting female officers. But in the past decade every other type of violence—inmates harming staff, one another and themselves—has soared (see chart two).
If you become a prison officer in Britain today, you are, bluntly, likely to get hurt. In the past year there were almost 10,000 assaults on staff. Around 3,200 of those led to serious injuries, a tally that would be enough to leave one in eight officers badly hurt. Several interviewees for this piece say, unprompted, that it is only a matter of time until an officer is killed.
The ever-present threat of violence worsens stage three of the cycle: a staffing crisis. Between 2010 and 2015 the prison budget was cut by 16%. Desperate to find savings, ministers removed a senior officer grade and offered experienced, better-paid staff early retirement. Ever since, the service has been running to stand still. Only half of officers today have more than five years’ experience, down from 80% in 2010.
Recent governments have tried to fill the gap in two ways. The first has been to raise the starting wage for a prison officer to £32,000 ($42,000). That is not always enough. “I can get the same on trains or as a lorry driver and not be attacked,” says Mark Fairhurst of the Prison Officers’ Association, a union.
The second is, in effect, lowering standards. Since 2022 officers have been recruited through a centralised process carried out by private firms like SSCL (which did not reply to our request for comment). These firms are paid for the number of trainees they sign up and push through the prison gates; they lack incentives to screen rigorously for quality or suitability. The main part of the training lasts six weeks, and is all online. One officer says a colleague bragged about getting their 15-year-old niece to click through it for them.
New officers arrive utterly unprepared for prison life, says David Wilson, a former governor who worked on recruitment in the 1990s. Even then, when the training lasted 20 weeks, he felt that was too short; in Norway it takes two years. Many recruits are teenagers in their first job.
A less robust recruitment process is vulnerable to malign actors. Criminal gangs need not bother corrupting existing officers to get drugs into prisons when they can put their own members through training. In July a female prison officer was fired after she was filmed having sex with an inmate at HMP Wandsworth; she had previously told a reality TV show that her types were “bandits”, “outlaws” and “criminals”.
The bigger concern is for prison officers with good intentions. The number of staff days lost to illness has soared in the past five years. Shortages mean recruits are soon out on the wings alone. “You have terrified 18-year-olds on night shifts responsible for a wing of 200 very troubled people,” says Liz Bridge, until recently a chaplain at HMP Wandsworth.
As prisons become more wretched and less able to attract good staff, they are also less likely to prepare inmates for life outside. Britain has a high recidivism rate, which exacerbates the problem of overcrowding. The doom loop is complete.
One thing did interrupt this grim cycle: the covid-19 pandemic. With inmates confined to their cells to stop the spread of disease, violence dropped. Staff felt they had regained control—even if it was with bolts and keys rather than what older officers call “jailcraft”. But even though the pandemic ended, some of its practices did not. Before covid, “22-hour bang up”, as prisoners call it, was vanishingly rare. Now more than two-thirds of inmates spend at least 18 hours a day in the cells. In reception prisons, where new prisoners are taken first, only half of inmates get out for more than two hours a day.
Staff know that isolating prisoners is only likely to spur mental ill-health and drug use (a study last year of a high-security prison found that 47% of prisoners had used spice, a synthetic drug that can encourage violence). Still, there is debate within the prison service about whether it is desirable, or even feasible, to get back to the old routines. In many category A and B prisons, for more serious offenders, there are few officersn left with any experience of opening a whole wing.
The best way to break the prison doom loop is to have fewer prisoners. Building support for such a shift will be hard. It is a political axiom, backed up by polling, that the public likes “tough” sentences. But the public also likes the idea of rehabilitation, and shows little obvious appetite to pay for incarcerating ever more people.
Mr Gauke’s review, which will report in the spring, has the task of squaring this circle. Its scope is wide; as well as sentencing and the use of mandatory minimum tariffs that have extended the length of prison terms, there is talk of using new technologies for home detention. But reviews do not always turn into policies, and the government’s messaging remains cautious.
Other countries do at least offer promising examples. America’s prison population has fallen by over a quarter in the past decade. The Netherlands cut its prison population by 44% in the decade to 2015 while investing in community supervision. Neither country has seen a public backlash. “It has been done in places not dissimilar to us,” says Mr Laidlaw. “I think we can
get there.”
